FREE RIO 2016 Olympics trip – highlights!

If you’re not then here’s a quick summary: I’m the student that was in the news as I won £14,000 of competitions in just 5 months and now it’s actually been 12 months and I’ve won over £35,000 of prizes, including this trip, a trip to Hong Kong and £10,000!

In this post I’m going to explain what my top 5 highlights were (there were literally too many to list)and give you guys a taster of what we got up too. This is the first in a series of Rio posts so make sure to subscribe to be the first to read the upcoming posts and also to be in win a chance of winning a £50 Amazon Voucher!

The upcoming posts include a 2-part post entitled ‘How We Comped Our Way to the Olympics‘ where I explain how myself and 5 other winners all managed to go to the Rio Olympics for freeand advise you guys (my lovely subscribers) on how you can possibly comp your way to Tokyo too! (The first of these is going live on Saturday!)

So anyway without further ado, here’s my 5 top highlights:

Meeting Jessica Ennis-Hill #TeamGB Silver Hepthalon Medalist (I literally love her and totally fangirled, and she was so lovely!) One of my goals of this trip was to meet one of my sporting heroes and I’m glad to say I managed to achieve it. We also met another super famous #TeamGB athlete, as to who that was, that will be revealed in another post.

So how did we meet Jessica Ennis-Hill? She along with 11 other #TeamGB medalists were on our flight home! The economy class queue was right next to the first class/business queue and so you could literally just go up to the athletes and ask for photos if you wanted (which I did, of course!) . I was literally shaking so much when I went to ask for the photo because I was so starstruck!

Here’s a play by play of what actually happened when we met:

My brother pointed her out, I took my Union Jack flag out of bag wrapped it around myself and went to approach her for the photo.

Me on the inside *Omg I can’t believe this is happening right now, I definitely need to document this moment*

Me: *I’m sorry I’m shaking* Can we get a photo please?

Her friend: Selfie or do you want me to take it?

Me: Can you take it please? *Hands shake as I hand over the phone*

Her friend: Omg, you literally are shaking, aww bless you! Do you want the nails first or a full length?

Me: *Excitedly* Nails please!

We then proceeded to get the above close-up of our nails and then a full-length too and then I went back to the economy class queue and proceeded to talk to all the other winners about how cool that was.

Upon excitedly reviewing the photos on the flight: I realised that we didn’t get a mid-length photo with our nails facing the camera (so you could clearly see it was her) – I forgot to ask as I was too busy majorly fangirling and so you can bet what happened next…

I went back after the 11-hour flight to ask for that particular photo. I literally didn’t want to disturb her again, but she was so genuinely lovely, so I didn’t think she’d mind, and this was obviously her last Olympics and this moment was never going to happen again and so I thought there’d be no harm in asking. My brother was saying ‘Don’t do it. She’ll think you’re a crazy fan’ etc. I didn’t listen and I’m hoping she found my total fangirling cute? Lol, it seems like she did, or maybe she was just super nice? I’ll never know lol.

———————– Moving on – fangirl anecdote over——————–

Me doing the Bolt pose right after we watched him win gold yet again!

2) Watching the Athletics live from the stadium and seeing Jessica Ennis-Hill win Silver in the Heptathlon, seeing Bolt and Mo Farah win Gold for the 100 and 10,000m respectively. The stadium atmosphere was actually electric, at the start of the 100m heats and the final respectively the stadium collectively went silent, you could literally hear a pin drop! The anticipation was crazy.

3) Seeing the respective male and female #TeamGB rowing teams win gold – this was literally such a surreal moment to witness. Once again the atmosphere was incredible.

Description below:

Description: Union Jack flags are raised in support as the Great Britain’s Women’s Rowing Team are awarded their Olympic gold medals on the stadium in the distance, behind the athletes you can make out a blurred Olympics logo statue.

4) Visiting the Rocinha Favela, the biggest Favela in South America. Upon walking through this Favela I felt really humbled and grateful, the poverty that the residents live in and the crime they’re exposed to on a daily basis is heartbreaking (there were young boys walking around with AK47’s). I’ll write a more detailed post on what it was truly like to bear witness to this soon.

The view from the top of the Favela.

5) Visiting the Christ the Redeemer monument and Sugarloaf Mountain. These are such big tourist attractions and are also also what I naturally associate with Rio and so they were top on my list of places to see.

Flying the flag for #TeamGB at Christ the Redeemer

Flying the Flag for #TeamGB at the top of Sugarloaf!

Did you like this post? Well then make sure to subscribe to be the first to read Part 1 of ‘How We Comped Our Way to the Olympics’ when it goes live. In that post I breakdown exactly myself and 5 winners all managed to go the Olympics for free!

Has this post inspired you in any way, shape or form?

Have you ever won a ‘once in a lifetime’ prize if so what was it? If not what would you like to win?

Let me know in the comments below.

P.S follow my Instagram and like my Facebook page –’the life of a student comper’ for both, to keep up to date with all of my comping shenanigans.